January 31st, 2016 from Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel on Vimeo.

On this week's episode of Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel: Alan Storm, CEO and superintendent of the Pima County Joint Technical Education District, talks about why lawmakers need to reverse an upcoming $30 million budget cut or the JTEDs are going to go out of business. (More on that in this week's Skinny.) 

Then Bruce Ash, the Republican National Committee for Arizona, and attorney Jeff Rogers, the former chair of the Pima County Democratic Party, talk about the GOP presidential jamboree, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain's reelection challenges and the degree of polarization in today's politics.

You can watch online above or catch the show at 8 a.m. Sunday on the CW Tucson, Channel 8 on Cox and Comcast and Channel 58 on broadcast, or at 5 p.m. Sunday on KXCI, 91.3 FM.

Here's a transcript of the show:

A powerful online campaign is collecting examples of blatant objectification of women and reminding us all what "sex sells" advertising is really saying. 

The campaign, championed by the hashtag #WomenNotObjects, was started in an attempt to fight sexism in advertising by woman-led, New York, advertising agency Badger and Winters.

Their viral campaign video features real women holding offensive ads. Each woman describes what the ad's not-so-subtle innuendo is implying about the pictured models.

The agency's website says, "In 2016, Badger and Winters made a commitment to never objectify women in our work."

The campaign video, created by Madonna Badger and her business partner Jim Winters, features popular ads from Tom Ford, Balmain, Burger King, Carl’s Jr. and others. The video has accumulated more than 1.2 million views so far.

Take a look and join the conversation on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook.

Sunset Magazine has put Bisbee on the list of the best communities in the West:

The main approach to Bisbee, southeastern Arizona’s mining town turned arts colony, is through a tunnel in a mountain. Once you pop out on the other side, you’ve entered a funky Shangri-la, a free-spirited community marked by a tangle of narrow streets streaming down the canyon and 19th-century cottages clinging precar­iously to the hills, along with a historic Main Street bristling with galleries.

Prospectors discovered copper, then gold, in the surrounding Mule Mountains, and by the 1880s a boomtown developed. When the mines played out in the 1970s, counterculturalists, artists, musicians, poets, and writers moved in, drawn by the scenic canyon setting, cheap rents, and preserved-in-amber historic architecture.

That’s when Bisbee coalesced into a proudly weird (to use a favorite local adjective) and quirky community—an outpost of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state. Local theater, community radio, yoga classes, reiki therapy, and vegan eateries took root. At the same time, Bisbee also evolved into a popular tourist destination. Galleries, pubs, boutiques, inns, and restaurants popped up. A monthly art walk, as well as annual craft beer, blues, and Americana music festivals now fill the calendar.

Newcomers today are largely drawn by not only the boho vibe, but also by affordable housing. Bisbee’s sense of community is also a big magnet for those considering relocating here.

The dumb Phoenix-area kids who spelled out the N-word on their T-shirts got the attention of the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, although he gives them credit for "using asterisks to spell out hateful words." Ah, progress!

Today's post in honor of School Choice Week: State proposals and lawsuits in Minnesota look at charter schools and desegregation. In general, segregation has increased in our public schools over the last few decades around the country, but charter schools tend to be more segregated than district schools. Should this be considered a civil rights issue? That's the question being raised in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Education is considering making charter schools create integration plans if they have large minority populations. The reporting I've read on the issue is confusing. Does it address charters with large white populations as well as those with large black populations? Is it more concerned with academic progress or desegregation? Whatever the specifics, the proposal is creating heated discussion in the state.

At the same time, a lawsuit accuses the state of allowing greater segregation in its public schools and maintains that charter schools have made the problem worse. A graph in the article shows 65 percent of black charter school students attend schools that are 90 percent minority, compared to 15 percent of students in district schools; 28 percent of white students are in charters with less than 10 percent minority students, compared to 12 percent in district schools.

My research in Tucson also shows that segregation is higher in charter schools than in TUSD. TUSD's student population is 64 percent Hispanic and 21 percent Anglo, which is a reflection of the population of school-aged children in the city. Tucson charters are 53 percent Hispanic and 37 percent Anglo, meaning that charters attract a disproportionate number of Anglo students. In Tucson charters, 35 percent of students attend schools with fewer than 30 percent Hispanic students, compared with 2 percent of TUSD students.

Minnesotans arguing against using desegregation rules with charter schools say that parents make active choices to send their children to charter schools, so it's not the state's concern if parents choose to send their children to schools with high percentages of white or black students.

School desegregation remains a hot-button issue across the country, not just here in Tucson, and the importance of charters in the deseg equation is receiving increased attention.

Just two weeks after chief curator Josh Chuang’s resignation became effective on Jan. 15, the Center for Creative Photography’s director, Dr. Katharine Martinez, announced her retirement.

Her last official day is this Saturday, Jan. 30.

Dr. Kimberly Andrews Espy, UA senior vice president for research and discovery, announced the unexpected retirement Tuesday in a terse memo to CCP staff.

A search for a new director will not begin until later this year, Espy wrote. Meantime, Dr. James Burns, director of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, will be acting administrative director.

Curator Rebecca Senf has been promoted to chief curator, taking Chuang’s empty seat while doing double duty as the CCP curator at the Phoenix Art Museum. Senf will also serve on a newly created “senior management council,” along with conservator Jae Gutierrez, archivist Leslie Squyres, and associate director Denise Gose.

The world-renowned CCP is a treasure trove of some 90,000 photos and the archives of eminent photographers from Ansel Adams to W. Eugene Smith. Yet since the early 2000s, the center has cycled through a procession of directors and curators, enduring years at a time with both positions left open.

When Martinez took the job as director on July 12, 2010, the center had gone without a leader for a year. There was no chief curator either. Even so, Martinez, a veteran of 11 years as librarian of Harvard College’s Fine Arts Library, did not move immediately to fill the chief curatorial post. By the time she hired Chuang in 2014, the position had been vacant for five years.

Espy gave praise to Martinez’s five-and-a-half-year tenure, noting that under her watch the “Center’s archives have grown, the research fellowship program was expanded, two gatherings of the photographic community known as ‘Conversations’ were presented, and a full-time conservator was hired to establish a conservation department.”

Martinez counted Chuang’s hire in April 2014 as a feather in her cap. She lured him away from a post as associate curator of photography and digital media at the Yale University Art Gallery, where he had established a reputation for savvy exhibitions that traveled the U.S. and even Europe.

I'll be honest: watching movies is kind of a new thing for me. Well, newer movies. Growing up, I'd seen every Ginger Rodgers film you could think of—but I wouldn't have been able to pick Tom Hanks out of a lineup. I saw Ghostbusters for the first time in 2014, and I still haven't found the time to watch Jaws. I know. I'm sorry, and I'm working on it.

Below is a list of the the most rented DVDs at Casa Video last week—they're all new releases, hot off their cinema run. For me? I'm still playing catch up. I think it's going to be a Being John Malkovich kind of weekend.


1. The Martian

Local bigwigs are working to revive an influential part of Tucson history with the upcoming Tucson Forum events.

The Fox Theater, 17 W. Congress, will be hosting Mr. Dennis Edwards, lead singer from The Temptations, on Sunday, Jan. 31 for a free armchair discussion.

The discussion, focusing on Edwards’ experiences in the music business during the Civil Rights movement, is free and open to the public. Tickets will be offered in advance at the Fox Theater box office but once doors open, it will be first-come, first-seated. Doors open at 4 p.m., the Forum begins at 5 p.m., and a Temptations Review in Concert will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets for the concert range from $25 to $50 and can be purchased here.

Operating from 1946 to 1984, the Sunday Evening Forum brought prominent and influential people to Tucson. These guests included John F. Kennedy,  Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr., according to the Tucson Forum website. At the Forum’s height, one meeting broke the record for the nation’s largest community forum, with 55,000 people in attendance. The board is hoping to return the forum to it’s former glory, with your help.

For more information, visit sundayeveningforum.com.

The Republican state lawmaker who wanted to prohibit people from video recording law enforcement agents up-close officially killed the controversial proposal.

The bill by state Sen. John Kavanagh would have made it a crime to film cops without their consent within 20 feet of "law enforcement activity." A first violation could have meant $300 in fines, and any more than that would have been punishable with up to six months in jail.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona immediately came out to say that the unnecessary restriction was a violation of First Amendment rights.

Kavanagh, who is a retired police officer, argued he was just trying to protect the safety of law enforcement agents.

The bill didn't even make it to a hearing, according to the Arizona Republic.

"It generated very emotional opposition on both sides," Kavanagh said. "That dooms a bill a bill to failure. Once a bill becomes so mired in controversy ... it's time to move on."

Among other issues, there was concern that the bill may have prevented individuals from recording their own interactions with police. Kavanagh said that had not been his intent with this bill.

The bill came at a time of increased scrutiny of police shootings nationwide, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to Eric Garner in New York. In November, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona launched Mobile Justice AZ, a free smartphone app that allows individuals to automatically send videos of law enforcement activity to the local ACLU if it appears someone's rights have been violated.
...
Kavanagh had initially said the proliferation of cellphones with video capability has created new concerns that must be addressed. He said his bill recognizes individuals' right to record law enforcement, but puts "reasonable restraints" on it.

"I'll go to my grave believing there's nothing wrong with requiring people who want to video police to stand 1.5 car lengths away," he said. 

First Amendment attorney Dan Barr had called the bill an "unconstitutional solution to a nonexistent problem."

"You've had a whole slew of courts hold that people have a First Amendment right to take video of the police in public," he said. "If this bill ever became law, it would be struck down in a nanosecond."

Today's post in honor of School Choice Week: A Tennessee experiment in improving low-performing schools using a state run, charter-heavy "Achievement School District" (ASD) and a district-run school turnaround model (iZone). Recent research indicates the ASD schools had no overall effect while students in the iZone schools showed measurable improvement.

Tennessee received $500 million in federal Race to the Top money to improve its lowest performing schools and doled it out to various improvement models. According to a Vanderbilt Peabody College study, where the districts created turnaround iZone schools, they saw "moderate to large positive effects in Reading, Math and Science with strong consistent effects across subjects for Memphis iZone schools." The ASD schools had years with gains and years with losses, ending up with no overall improvement.

Democrats in the Tennessee state legislature are using data from the Vanderbilt study to try and close the Achievement School District and turn the schools back to the districts, which will have the option of keeping them as charter schools or revoking the charter agreements.